The Forlorn(40)

Keilin remembered the burned-edged pages in back of the old book, Geophysical Survey of Planet IV, which his mother said their family had always had . . . so that was what it had been about. It made sense now. "Log of the Starship Morningstar"! But the events Cap talked of were different from those described . . . not totally different, just, well, not quite the same.

Cap held up the pendant. "But if I can get all of these . . . get into Morningstar II, the second control center, with one psi, and we're away. There is a spare crew up there, frozen. We can be off looking for a wormhole nexus before you can say `knife.' "

He looked at the bemused faces. "Hell! I might as well be talking Greek to you! Just take my word for it. That is a starship up there. It was once an asteroid called Juno. It had two detachable control centers, the size of small mountains themselves. Both of them were deployed, because a Morkth battleship managed to pick us up and follow us in the flight from Earth, despite the fact that Earth threw everything she could spare into that last `diversionary' attack. Our weakest link was those control centers. Without them to handle planetside matter transmission, we couldn't discharge passengers. Captain Fisher decided it would be safer to have them both down on the planet. It was one of the few orders of his that Evie Lee didn't countermand, although she insisted that the second one, Morningstar II, stay in inactive mode."

He ground his teeth. "Computer's awake in there, but nothing else. The bitch had it all planned. She did a data dump at the last minute, programming the thing to exclude anything but her type. But I think I can get around that . . ."

Keilin looked up at the full moon. Half of what the man said was beyond him, but he knew what a spaceship was supposed to look like. There'd been several pictures on book covers. "That's really a spaceship? I thought, I mean in the pictures I saw they were all pointed and, um, shiny metal."

"Streamlining's pretty pointless for something that never enters an atmosphere. And a big asteroid had the plus of providing lots of raw material that we didn't have to lift out of the gravity well. Ceres was supposed to be next. I doubt if the engineers got there. You see, we never even got the seventeen years they'd predicted we'd have, before the Morkth invasion hit the solar system. So that is it, above us. Mankind's last hope. A forlorn hope. The good starship Morningstar."

Beywulf chuckled and turned to Leyla. "On board the good starship Venus

whose figurehead

was a nude in bed

sucking—"

There was no approval in Cap's voice as he interrupted. "That's enough, Beywulf. For all that it's bloody accurate, and that it was a common enough joke among the non-psi crew. The figurehead captain's name was your Evie Lee." The last word was said with overt hatred.

He shook himself, visibly clearing away the excess emotion. "So. I need to collect these transmitter-core sections, and one psionic of sufficient power, and the starship can move on from star to star. We can finally see that it carries out its original mission: to scatter the seeds of Earth far and wide, beyond the reach of Morkth xenophobia." He spoke with such conviction and power that Keilin wanted to be part of it. It was only the bonds that stopped him leaping to his feet and cheering. Being tied up poured cold water on his enthusiasm, allowing him to ask in a fairly steady voice, "What is a psionic, sir? Are you going to find one?"

A wintry smile touched one side of Cap's mouth. "You are one. So is the girl. So is S'kith. A psionic has the ability to do things by mental power alone, like read minds or move things without touching them. Such people are very rare. One in fifty million, perhaps. Which is why Evie Lee's little clique of nutters were able to insist that she was given overall command of the starship, in spite of her having the same capacity for command as I have for childbirth."

Keilin had a retentive mind for details and he was nothing if not stubborn. "Sir. I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I can't do anything just with my mind. If I could I wouldn't be here."

Cap looked at him keenly. "More guts than sense. You keep arguing with me, boy. The core sections can only be activated by psionics. Did you notice the stone going cold . . . during sex for instance?"

Keilin blushed and very carefully didn't look at the girl next to him. "Er . . . yes."

"Typical of Evie Lee's descendants. She had a couch right there on top of the transmitter chamber. Did any little thing pop out of thin air when you did it?" Cap carefully ignored the guffaw from Beywulf and the snort from Leyla.

Keilin thought of the Patrician's treasury. Hardly a "little thing." Just the biggest flipping phallic symbol in the city. He nodded, hoping he would not be asked for details. To lead off the subject, he added. "The Morkth came just after that too. Every time."